Hyperscale, cyber vaulting and tougher policies -- storage and data predictions for 2023

Data is increasingly seen as being among and organization’s most valuable assets and businesses are generating more and more of it.

But of course it has to be stored and kept secure. Much of it is in an unstructured form too, which creates additional challenges. We asked some experts in the data and storage field to give us some predictions for this sector in the coming year.

Brian Spanswick, chief information security officer at Cohesity, expects to see an increase in 'cyber vaulting' to protect data from attack. "Cyber vaulting will be a huge area of focus in 2023. The best perimeter security is useless if your backups are seized and cyber vaulting is the best modern method of protecting your backup data in a successful attack. More and more vendors who follow a 1-2-3 approach will turn to SaaS for cyber vaulting for its efficiency, reduced infrastructure, and required ITOps and SecOps resources."

Cloud storage needs to shoulder some of the compliance burden says John Engates, field CTO at Cloudflare. "The cloud itself should take the compliance burden off companies. Developers shouldn't be required to know exactly how and where their data can be legally stored or processed. The burden of compliance should largely be handled by the cloud services and tools developers are building with. Networking services should route traffic efficiently and securely while complying with all data sovereignty laws. Storage services should inherently comply with data residency regulations. And processing should adhere to relevant data localization standards."

Ryan Davis, CISO of NS1 echoes this. "…many CISOs have to navigate the security challenges of hybrid-cloud architecture, and in 2023, maintaining and securing a sprawling footprint will be a top priority. They'll need to track and secure data as it moves between on-premise data centers and the cloud and ensure that the data stored on the cloud meet applicable compliance standards. Even if CISOs aim to become 'cloud-native,' legacy security solutions may impede this transition by requiring an on-premise presence, so identifying and removing these solutions will be a gradual but necessary process. Finally, CISOs should recognize that moving to the public cloud means they can't control 100 percent of their risk, as it's up to the cloud provider to disclose zero-day vulnerabilities. Each CISO will need to figure out how to account for this uncertainty and decide how much risk is acceptable."

Carl D'Halluin, CTO of Datadobi believes new solutions will be needed to deal with unstructured data:

Organizations will be forced to look for new approaches to manage unstructured data growth in 2023. Many have already noticed that the pace of unstructured data growth is snowballing exponentially faster than it has in the past. This leads to increased costs, as companies have to buy more storage, and the introduction of risk, as the organization has less knowledge about the data as it ages in its network. Organizations need new solutions to minimize the financial impact and risk their business faces.

Furthermore, much of this unstructured data is stored in network-attached storage (NAS). This is because many applications haven't yet been redeveloped to leverage object storage. So, much of an organization's unstructured data will continue to be stored on-premises in 2023. Because of this, public cloud providers will form more relationships with traditional on-premises NAS vendors. They will offer branded, cloud-based, managed file services. These services will benefit customers because they have a simple 'on-ramp,' they preserve pre-existing documentation and processes, and they take care of the underlying hardware and operating environment for the customer

Shawn Brume, IBM storage evangelist also sees new use cases generating large amounts of data. "Massive amounts of data will be standard for new use cases like waste management tracking haul rates, dump rate, recycling conditions and distributions as well as long term ecological impacts where some data must live for 20-30 years before it becomes valuable."

Data retention policies will need to be strengthened, says Fred Forslund, VP and GM international at Blancco. "As privacy regulations increase worldwide, 2023 will be a big year for policy change driven both internally and externally. Internally, we'll see a lot of enterprises tidy up their data retention policies to set clearer guidance on when data is considered to have reached end-of-life and should be erased. This will create both security and financial benefits for those organisations looking to derive improved value from and gain better control over their data. With storage usage going up by around 60 percent year-on-year, changing policy to set clear retention periods for when redundant, obsolete or trivial data should be erased in line with policy will help reduce storage costs and decrease the attack surface. Externally, we'll also see a lot more sustainability regulations come into effect. These new regulations won’t necessarily spark a huge overhaul of individual organisations’ sustainability policies, it's more likely to come into effect in 2024. However, CSOs and sustainability teams will be spending much of 2023 getting to grips with the new regulations as new requirements for them to report on scope three emissions surface."

Hyperscale data will start to become mainstream, believes Chris Gladwin, CEO, and co-founder of Ocient:

Data-intensive businesses are moving beyond big data into the realm of hyperscale data, which is exponentially greater. And that requires a reevaluation of data infrastructure.

In 2023, data warehouse vendors are will develop new ways to build and expand systems and services.

It's not just the overall volume of data that technologists must plan for, but also the burgeoning data sets and workloads to be processed. Some leading-edge IT organizations are now working with data sets that comprise billions and trillions of records. In 2023, we could even see data sets of a quadrillion rows in data-intensive industries such as adtech, telecommunications, and geospatial.

Hyperscale data sets will become more common as organizations leverage increasing data volumes in near real-time from operations, customers, and on-the-move devices and objects.

Dan Kogan, VP of product management at Pure Storage, predicts a move towards greater sustainability in managing storage. "Building a sustainable model for the future requires technologies that are engineered to require significantly lower power, lower cooling, and far less waste, with the potential to make a significant and immediate impact on reducing global carbon emissions. However, often overlooked is the impact that operational efficiency can have on sustainability. Introducing operational efficiency by enabling a public cloud-like, self-service infrastructure on premises, can introduce meaningful physical efficiencies of organizations' equipment. In 2023, organizations will look to enable end users to consume IT resources via self-service requests -- adding resources on the backend as needed over pre-provisioning and configuring up-front -- to drive better equipment efficiencies and ultimately support sustainability efforts."

Alluxio's founder and CEO Haoyuan (H.Y.) Li says, "Data Lakes are rising to prominence and structured data is transitioning to new formats. In 2022, open-source projects like Apache Iceberg or Apache Hudi will replace more traditional Hive warehouses in cloud-native environments, enabling Presto and Spark workloads running more efficiently on a large scale."

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